Ingratitude

am grateful to be alive in 2020, grateful to bear witness to the Age of Covid in the Trump Era, grateful for the response to the pandemic playing out here in the U.S. by a new generation of frontline health care providers, first responders, local government officials, scientists, parents, students. In addition, I am grateful for streaming services and bingeing, late-night talk show hosts, Notorious RGB, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the local IGA grocery and its many essential employees, and Zoom and Zooming. And dreaming.

Gratitude. And dreams. Dreams define who we are. Whether wandering the abstract cartoonland of sleep-lit neural highways and back alleys, or trekking the endless paths of pure aspiration, dreams guide individuals, communities, nations, and cultures into the future. Whereas 2020 has been a good year for curling up in bed and working out lockdown life in the abstract, it’s not been such a good year for dreaming big dreams.

Grateful as I am for the next generations, I can’t escape the dissonant reactions I feel for them in the Age of Covid. On one hand, millions of high school and college students, in-coming freshmen and outgoing seniors have largely been denied their institutional rites of passage thanks to Covid. On the other hand, 2020 is and will forever be a date to reckon with, the year when the collective power of dreams stood toe to toe with death and protest and destruction.

I remember my protracted coming of age in the late 60s and well into the mid70s, leaving high school, starting college as a cub editor and reporter. Gradually radicalized covering events of 1968, I soon found myself without a scholarship and drafted. When I returned home, my views on the treatment of Black men were informed by racism in the Army. Then a sudden marriage and a child, and more college. My head exploded with fully formed responsibilities and raw creative energy. Mine was a dream-filled coming-of-age disrupted by my staunch opposition to the Vietnam War, support for the civil rights struggle, pursuit of elusive muses, and the uncontrollable compulsion to write about it all.

That tumultuous first decade as an adult ended about the time Ronald Reagan became president. I arranged my principles into a mental toolbox and embarked on becoming an American in the sense that I poked my head up from the underground into the realities of mainstream citizenry. Revolution by masquerade I called it.

I pulled the grocery bag off my head: cut my hair and shaved my beard. Then I left America to spend much of the next decade working in Africa, beginning with 2 ½ years in Peace Corps. My wife and I eventually ended up inside the Beltway, Northern Virginia, three blocks from the East Falls Church Metro station and the Orange Line.

In a dreamlike reversal of a rebellious youth, gratitude slowly replaced bitterness toward my native land. With profound reservations, I allowed myself to feel pride again about being an American, regardless of who lived in the White House But so enchanted was I with all my highfalutin adult perspicacity, boyish patriotism and business class upgrades, I didn’t notice that somewhere on the road to the Twenty-first Century, all the principled tools in my toolbox had timed out; they had become obsolete.

History is not going to separate the pandemic of 2020 from the reign of Donald Trump. Coronavirus-2019 in the Trump Era is a tragic farce. Covid has become emotional shorthand for death in quarantine lying flat on your belly tethered to a breathing tube.

It is also cultural code now for the creeping rift between compassion and liberty; old and young; masks and militias; compromised immunity and raging hormones; social distancing and religious observance; commuting by bicycle and mobspread by chopper; community transmission and community; weddings, reunions and funerals, and funerals.

Nor will history forget the summer of 2020, how the murder of George Floyd brought quarantine numb protestors into the streets of Minneapolis. Many wore masks. Many did not. Covid had suddenly become an afterthought. When protestors marched from 38th and Chicago over to the MPD Third Precinct headquarters, what happened next would brand the social justice demonstrations with violent disregard for life and property.

Looters and arsonists hijacked the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievance. The scene at the Third Precinct, abandoned by police and set on fire while rioters destroyed the adjacent commercial district, would serve as a template of injustice and rage for cities across the U.S. and around the world.

I popped open my toolbox to grasp righteous indignation and found every one of my principled gadgets from the past had corroded due to lack of use and caked completely white with the privilege of not being a Black man.

The matter of Black lives, the importance of equality and justice, principles that I had once wielded defiantly, needed a serious upgrade. I cannot ignore the fact that the longer my principles had languished in white privilege, the more irrelevant they became to the day-to-day concerns of Black,

Brown, Indigenous and LGBTQ people

For so many opportunities and second chances to dream, too many to list or even remember them all, I am grateful. But 2020 has reminded me that as with any colonial or post-colonial, race- and class-biased system, societal opportunities often come at the expense of someone being denied them. It’s going to take a while for privileged white society to adapt to the entirely new reality that 2020 has brought into focus. 2020 will never go away.

It is the demonstrated ingratitude for fragile white America’s unsolicited gift to non-whites of inequality that I am perhaps most grateful for in the fall of 2020. Most ungrateful, I am, in my heart, for allowing myself to slip slowly into white privilege and white primacy like the storied frog in a pot, unaware till the water is about to boil over into the streets that it is too late to change the outcome.

The 400-year struggle for social justice continues. Certainly, in the media, arts and entertainment world, the struggle continues for representation, opportunities and second chances in a milieu dominated by white and white male privilege. Covid-19 will remain a threat so long as Americans remain divided politically. That means people of color will continue to be at greater risk of contracting and dying from the virus.

Redress for this is complicated by the infrastructure of white privilege in every socioeconomic sector of American life. As Dr. King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It is not just magical thinking to believe this is a human truism. Nor is it realistic to think that humans do not have to, from time to time, mount the arc of the moral universe in prodigious numbers in order to speed up bending the arc closer and closer to the ideal of justice for all.

The Age of Covid in the Trump Era gives us much to be grateful for, including ingratitude for the murder of Black men and women under the knee of police, including the disproportionate number of Blacks, Browns and other minorities, and senior citizens in nursing homes, dying from the novel virus. 2020 has exposed fault lines, terrible societal weaknesses, systemic institutional racism, and a failure of whites to ally with people of color, first peoples, immigrants, and the poor.

I’m sick and tired of Trump Era political rhetoric. This lying grifter in the White House, and his gang of enablers, and the gaggle of his base has got to go. So please vote. Then be prepared to demonstrate the courage of your convictions and do what you know is right, continue to fight for social justice and equality, and continue to dream.